Flight delays spread from the New York area to Washington, D.C.; Dallas; and Los Angeles on Tuesday, the third straight day of air-traffic controller furloughs that all sides in the sequester debate consider outrageous — but nobody’s prepared to stop. Instead of easing the pain of the flying public, both parties are scoring political points from an air traffic nightmare that’s only just beginning.

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The Obama administration and congressional Republicans can agree on just one thing: It’s the other side’s responsibility to take the lead in solving the problem.

Republicans are promoting the Twitter hashtag “#ObamaFlightDelays” while the House GOP Conference is distributing talking points blaming the FAA. Meanwhile, after two months of issuing explicit warnings about the budget cuts’ calamitous effect on the skies, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said Tuesday that lawmakers bear the blame for passing the sequester law in 2011, saying that “this is very bad policy that Congress passed and they should fix it.”

It’s a textbook example of what so many hate about Washington, leaving those caught in the middle with little to do but watch in dismay.

“Everybody seems much more interested in either ‘I told you so’ or ‘You’re putting travelers at risk for political benefit,’” a former high-ranking state transportation official said. “Right now, people are too happy to try to blame it on the other party. And I think that’s going to run for a while.”

“There is plenty of blame to go around,” said one former senior Republican Senate staffer. “Congress for not doing its basic job of funding the government and the [White House] for playing politics with a safety issue and mucking up the economy as a result.”

The airline industry was just trying to stay out of the crossfire. “We are not taking sides,” said Jean Medina, a spokeswoman for the industry group Airlines for America. “We are on the side of our customers, trying to prevent them from being impacted by needless cuts.”

The cuts have already struck passengers across the country, stranding travelers at Los Angeles International for as long as three hours Sunday night and delaying thousands of flights Monday, at least 1,200 of which the Transportation Department blamed on the sequester’s cuts. New York’s airspace was congested for a second straight day Tuesday morning, with other delays sporadically reported in Los Angeles, Charlotte and Reagan National Airport, spreading later in the day to Dulles and Dallas-Fort Worth.

At the same time, both political parties stuck hard to their talking points.

In the Senate, senior GOP lawmakers appeared before reporters Tuesday to denounce the delays as a “manufactured crisis” that “smells of politics.”

“There are many options that the FAA itself and the Department of Transportation as a whole [have] to avoid this impact, this disastrous impact on the traveling public,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said.

Earlier in the afternoon, White House spokesman Jay Carney told the media that “Congress has to act in order to avert these delays.”

“We did everything we could to avert the sequester,” Carney said, “and unfortunately, Republicans decided as a political matter that it was a home run for them to inflict this upon the American people.”

Republicans reject that argument, saying the FAA should simply shift its $637 million in cuts to less essential programs to spare the 15,000 air-traffic controllers. But the administration maintains that that solution would be illegal and unworkable under the sequestration law.